REVIEW: Spit at Here for Now Theatre Company
There’s lots you can find out about a person through their saliva. Their parentage, their physical attributes, their allergies. Their lore. And, with some context, their trauma.
Spit by Noelle Brown starts with a single vial of the stuff, and what follows is a painful reckoning on both personal and national levels. Alannah (Fiona Mongillo) wants to find her birth mother. Nicole (Siobhan O’Malley) and Jessica (Seána O’Hanlon) are reeling from the death of their own. A horrible family secret lingers in the Irish air, heavy and sad.
Somewhere in contemporary Ireland these three women come to terms with the atrocities inflicted upon young, pregnant women by the Catholic Church, learning together the ramifications of Irish mother and baby homes. Unwed Irish women were forced to carry babies to term and then often had those babies taken from them, whisked away to adoptive families or group homes. Alannah becomes a mouthpiece for an evident wealth of research by Brown — in her voice we learn over 100,000 women went through these homes, and records of their time spent there were often destroyed or otherwise tampered with. It’s a grim history of abuse and unchecked power: the echoes of Canadian residential schools peal loudly.
The trio of women navigating Brown’s text onstage are uniformly strong. Mongillo’s Alannah is just right, curious and sad, and O’Malley and O’Hanlon are a completely believable pair of bickering sisters. Seana McKenna’s direction (she’s directed quite a bit in addition to her expansive acting career) is nicely understated, using the spare Falstaff Family Centre classroom space efficiently and highlighting the talents of set and costume designer Bonnie Deakin and lighting and sound designer Stephen Degenstein. Two couches and a podium more than suggest Jessica and Nicole’s shabby apartment, and lighting effectively punctuates moments of high drama.
The structure of Brown’s text brings an appreciated straightforwardness to the history at hand. It’s a simple, sad story of three sisters wading through a trough of Irish shame (it’s worth pointing out all three actors’ Irish accents are very strong). I certainly didn’t know about the sprawling legacy of Irish mother and baby homes prior to this show, and have to imagine some others didn’t either. Though the script is peppered with a few more numerical statistics than I’d prefer — at times they feel just a touch inorganic — the story never feels inaccessible to a Canadian audience or playing space.
Stratford’s Here for Now has put on some damn good work this summer (artistic director Mongillo in particular has shone in both Girls & Boys and Spit), and it’s worth checking the troupe out if you find yourself with an evening to spare at a certain Shakespeare festival. The work, spare though it may be, is rigorous, challenging, and of extremely high calibre. Spit, in all its familial drama, is an excellent introduction to a history which painfully mirrors Canada’s: it’s strong, strong work.
Spit ran at Here for Now theatre company in Stratford, ON. You can check out the rest of their season here.
Aisling Murphy
Aisling is Intermission's former senior editor and the theatre reporter for the Globe and Mail. She likes British playwright Sarah Kane, most songs by Taylor Swift, and her cats, Fig and June. She was a 2024 fellow at the National Critics Institute in Waterford, CT.
LEARN MORE
iPhoto caption: Jane Spidell in 'Twelve Dinners.' Photo by Dahlia Katz.
REVIEW: Family tensions run high in TIFT’s intimate Twelve Dinners
In the now-closed Twelve Dinners, an autobiographical play written and directed by Steve Ross, audiences received intimate access to an unvarnished version of a younger Ross through 12 evening meals with his parents.
iPhoto caption: Members of the company of 'Narnia.' Photo by Dahlia Katz.
REVIEW: Bad Hats’ Narnia is a joyful, heartwarming escape
The spirit of openness and the joy of discovery rule over this Narnia. Open the wardrobe and see.
iPhoto caption: Members of the company of 'Robin Hood.' Photo by Dahlia Katz.
REVIEW: Canadian Stage’s Robin Hood panto is anti-capitalist fun for the whole family
Following Ross Petty’s legacy of scene-stealing, Damien Atkins as the evil Prince John is easily the greatest delight of the show.
iPhoto caption: Lauren Gillis and Alaine Hutton in 'Public Consumption.' Photo by Eden Graham.
REVIEW: Lester Trips’ stylish Public Consumption captures the internet’s profound emptiness
Rather than directly representing online life, Public Consumption speculates — with virtuosity — about how the digital world affects our bodies. And the show's findings are by no means comfortable.
iPhoto caption: Tony Ofori and Daren A. Herbert in 'Moonlight Schooner.' Photo by Dahlia Katz.
Kanika Ambrose’s Moonlight Schooner is animated and visually stunning, but its individual pieces don’t come together as neatly as I would've expected.
iPhoto caption: Fiona Mongillo in 'Reproduktion.' Photo by Ann Baggley.
REVIEW: Here For Now’s well-acted Reproduktion attempts to tackle too much
Amy Rutherford’s world premiere script is ambitious and the material it covers is complex — but the narrative feels disjointed.
iPhoto caption: Photo by Aisling Murphy.
In the darkest months of Yukon winter, it’s all about the Sun Room
I’m here for a week in January as a guest of Nakai Theatre, a hub for theatrical experimentation and outside-the-box programming in Canada’s westernmost territory.
Armchairs, tattoos, and an online theatre magazine
When I started at Intermission, my world was limited to the confines of an armchair. Arts journalism was a high it felt dangerously fruitless to chase. The life stretched ahead of me was amorphous and frightening, a chasm filled with hand sanitizer and immigration concerns. It was worth crying over a spilled kombucha and scrubbing at the stain.
iPhoto caption: Liz Appel headshot courtesy of Liz Appel.
Five questions with Wights playwright Liz Appel
Intermission spoke with Appel over email for a brief Q&A about Wights, now playing at Crow’s Theatre until February 9.
Call for applications: Publishing and editorial assistant
Intermission Magazine is seeking a dynamic and collaborative individual to join our team.
iPhoto caption: What Writing Can Do: The 2025 Musical Theatre Critics Lab
Announcing What Writing Can Do: The 2025 Musical Theatre Critics Lab
What Writing Can Do is timed to coincide with the Grand and Theatre Aquarius’ co-production of Waitress, which will serve as a jumping-off point for discussions throughout the Lab.
iPhoto caption: A Christmas Story production still by Dahlia Katz.
REVIEW: A Christmas Story feels fresh at Theatre Aquarius
If you want to catch A Christmas Story before it closes, good luck — the show is close to sold out, and with the talent on that stage, it’s not hard to see why.
Comments